Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Every year the Freud family dogs presented birthday poems to their master. These rhymes written by Anna were a coded communication with her father and an expression of suppressed tenderness. They enact a return to the affections and appetites of her childhood, and also her anxieties about feeding and separation. The three-way relationship between Anna and Sigmund Freud and their pets confuses behavioural categories. Both the pets and Anna's doggerel poems (here in their first rhyming translation) mediate outlawed or otherwise ignored impulses. This essay argues the importance of "trivia" in history and biography.
Dreaming, "'we are not in the least surprised when a dog quotes a line of poetry . . .'," 2 Sigmund Freud (1900) himself quotes in The Interpretation of Dreams. On waking up, though, we may well ask what such dream dogs could have represented? and what verse did they quote? Perhaps we might expect something like the following lines:
Sin manos no se puede agarrarse
y sin pecho no abrazarse
y sin ojos no mirarse
y no amarse sin verdad!
[Without hands you cannot grasp
and without a breast you cannot clasp
and without eyes you cannot see
and without truth you cannot love!] 3
(Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein. August 20, 1873 )
In these lines we hear the seventeen-year-old Freud, in the role of the Spanish dog Cipion, celebrating love and the body and their necessary conjunction: this early rhyme, in effect, already contains the essence of his future work. Moreover it enacts the end of rhyming, for the series "agarrarse-abrazarse-mirarse" is not allowed to culminate in the fourth and final "amarse." Instead the ultimate "verdad" [truth] breaks the doggerel pattern by endstopping rhyme and rhythm.
The etymology of the word "doggerel" remains uncertain, although it is likely to have been formed by analogy with dog and in the derogatory sense of something clumsy or ill-done. For in this semantic field a dog is ridiculous or contemptible. However, there is another level of dog imagery where the animal represents fidelity and affection, even a model of ideal love. Two years before her death Anna Freud wrote about her father's relationship with dogs:
What Freud valued in his dogs was their gracefulness, devotion, and fidelity; what he...